Capitalism Is a Very Successful Cancer: The Millions Interviews Eugene Lim

Related Books:

Eugene Lim will not choose between superheroes and soliloquies. His new novel, Dear Cyborgs, shifts between quick bursts of pulpy action and long philosophical monologues. Characters kidnap, shoot, and poison one other, then weigh the merits of protest and relay brushes with gentrification. Capitalism looms over the book like one of Marvel’s Sentinels — inescapable, maybe indestructible. Low art sits next to high, smudging the hierarchy. The term “thoughtful dystopian romp” comes to mind. The year or universe is hazy, but we can make out some of our less fine hours, our targeted ads. Two worlds slide together and a third comes into focus. Is this how people write in the future?

Lim and I exchanged emails about the value of protest, the act of reading as resistance, and the death and rebirth of the novel.

The Millions: Do you consider Dear Cyborgs a piece of protest art, or rather a means of “unveiling life” (as advocated by Tehching Hsieh)?

Eugene Lim: I half-quote a piece of self-admonition associated with Antonio Gramsci on the first page of my book: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” For me, this captures a pretty common contemporary state of cognitive dissonance. So I’m not sure if the book is an act of protest as much as it’s an attempt to articulate this emotional state as well as look into what it’s like to try to constantly maintain it and what it’s like to live within its turmoil.

There’s a directive made by the left that hopelessness and despair are to be avoided as they are emotions of some luxury. And furthermore, it’s bad for morale, so if one were to actually speak and so spread one’s despair, well, then the masses won’t come out, the public won’t march in the streets, and people will just give up. I think there’s a great deal of practical wisdom in this line of thought. (Here’s an even better articulation, by Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, of the near-null practical value of despair as well as that of t-shirt Marxism — and furthermore a definition of politics as necessary and terrible.)

However, one can’t observe the ongoing situation and, on one level, not allow the stirrings of despair and hopelessness. To deny these emotions in the face of war crime, violent structural racism, climate destruction, etc. is to be intellectually dishonest. And we all live with this schizophrenia (a parallel one to our moment of apocalypse-always and simultaneous techno-futurist utopia), which is so pervasive that we barely allow ourselves to acknowledge it.

TM: Is protesting an effective way to bring about change in 2017? Or does it just allow the individual protestor to “make a moral world in which she can abide” (a line from your book)?

EL: I don’t know. I think mass movements and demonstrations have been very important. Historically it’s very important for people simply to show up. Take the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests, or the first Earth Day gathering in 1970. Nixon saw the crowd and supposedly said something like, “Some of those people are Republicans,” and went on to pass major environmental legislation. Or you could look at the large flash protests at JFK and other airports after the announcement of SCROTUS’s Muslim ban.

The counterexample cited in the book is the February 15th, 2003, worldwide day of marches to protest the US invasion of Iraq. Some call it the largest protest in human history,* but the Bush administration was undeterred. Other cynical counterexamples could include every Earth Day march of the past decade. Reductively, but not entirely inaccurately, one can argue that the state has learned that if a clear majority of public opinion runs counter to its will and the synonymous will of its corporate masters, the state can ignore this majority because it can manipulate elections and regulations so as to remain in power.

And yet and yet… protests can and do matter. The Black Lives Matter movement is a key example. Another: the ruling for same-sex marriage as recent fodder for the argument that history “bends toward justice.” Importantly, you don’t know how this is going to happen. Chomsky says that prior to Occupy Wall Street, if you were to ask him if taking over some downtown street block would make a big difference, he would have said of course not. But OWS crystallized, framed, and popularized an analysis of class inequality that is still resonating today.

Who knows which act will become significant, so arguments about effectiveness are riddled with uncertainty — still one has to act. But how? It’s a question less answerable with a prescriptive response than with the spirit and unpredictability of art, of some flash of insight or opening.

TM: A piece of graffiti in Dear Cyborgs reads, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Is it easier for you? If so, why?

EL: That was a memorable line I’d chanced upon and which I remembered because it seemed to state the issue rather perfectly. It’s an unattributed quote found in an essay by Fredric Jameson (though others have identified its source, and a certain slovenly Slovenian I believe retweeted it). In our season, where bestseller lists and blockbusters seem to be monopolized by competing visions of dystopia and apocalypse — but where the idea of successful collective action to combat the destruction of our planet by Big Oil remains impossible — it would seem to me a line of some persuasive accuracy. Why is this so? Probably someone with more relevant experience than a novelist should be asked, but I’ll venture that capitalism is a very very successful cancer because it’s extremely hard to not want to keep up with the Joneses.

TM: Hua Hsu writes that you have “an uncanny sense of what it’s like to be alive right now: constantly distracted, bounding between idealism and cynicism, ever conscious of the fact that we may never bring the size and complexity of our world into focus.” Do you consider this a fair characterization of what it’s like to be alive in 2017? Is this what you were going for in the book?

EL: I think Hsu’s description is a fair characterization of our times. Perpetual distraction and multitasking seem absolutely the norm, the result of the information overload and the fast-paced, shifting landscape of the attention economy. And the simultaneous intellectual cynicism/pessimism and willful idealism/optimism comes from a desire to rebel against complicity only to have ourselves discover our very existence encoded with it. But that diagnosis is not exactly news.

One thing I would like to do — and perhaps Dear Cyborgs does a little of this — is to approach the novel without the locus of character as its main technology. I’d like to describe the chaotic matrix in which we’re living through some other narrative device, some new way that supersedes our dependence on character as empathy avatar and our traditional use of plot as an arc about conflict resolution, and furthermore a method that accounts for the intense mind-boggling complexity we live in that somehow must be apprehended by our puny individual minds. In Dear Cyborgs, the method I tried was a kind of monologue-fractal, which is why all the characters in the book may seem empty or unrealistic, and yet their speeches seem familiar and hopefully poignant and/or meaningful.

It would be odd — in this singularity-approaching data-flooded contemporary world, one where wild algorithmic financial transactions create hidden transnational empires and where we daily use machines the majority of us have no idea how and why they really work — for this almost vestigial not to mention necessarily linear art form, the novel, to be the one best suited to manifest, depict, and perform our world. But maybe it’s so.

TM: How and why did you decide to end the book with these words: “…mourned and was chased and chased and fought and mourned and mourned and mourned and mourned”?

EL: I’d rather let others speculate on the meaning of the book’s ending, but I will say something about the several kinds of grieving that are undercurrents to the book and which, on a personal level, I feel are entwined. Perhaps the primary one is the historic loss, from one point of view, of even the possibility of effective protest. Or at least the loss of protest as it once was framed and done. This is a kind of loss of innocence. Then, in terms of cyborg culture, there’s also this weird grief of going through a very particular inflection point, i.e., I’m from the last generation that grew up without the internet. This makes for a rather epic middle-aged feeling of loss, which is a bit aggrandizing because my generation’s loss of youth was simultaneous with this huge cultural shift. In addition, there is another loss that only a few may feel but which nonetheless is very intense, that is: the ongoing eroding of deep reading and the loss of the novel’s supremacy in culture.

However, I believe — and in some ways have tried to show — that the meditative act of reading is a kind of resistance to a persistent and insidious dissolving of agency and our alienation by the forces of capitalism. Also, finally, I have tried to show that if the old narrative ideas of a Freytag plot path of redemption or self-discovery or epiphany are stale, at least there may be other possibilities. That is: the novel is dead; long live the novel.

Evan Allgood
is a writer from Virginia whose work has appeared in McSweeney's, Paste, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, The Billfold, and New York magazine's Science of Us. Follow and maybe later unfollow him on Twitter @evoooooooooooo.

So many of us had collections of short stories we read in seventh grade as an introduction to fiction. We were never taught the short story as a unique form. It was an introduction to longer forms. This book was really about looking at what makes a short story such a distinct discipline. The writers we chose to introduce the stories are known for their mastery of that particular medium, which is so deceptively difficult.

I read and admired Leslie Jamison’sThe Gin Closet when it first came out --and was immediately curious about its author: How could someone so young (Jamison was 26 at publication) write a book so lyrical, dark and knowing? As she and I both found ourselves in Iowa City this last spring, Jamison, now 28, agreed to sit down for a chat.
This was Jamison’s second stint in Iowa City; she’d received her MFA from the Writers Workshop five years ago, and is presently a PhD candidate at Yale. Now, she was accompanying her boyfriend, another Yale PhD student, while he got his MFA in poetry at the workshop.
On a cool spring day, before the cornfields were plowed or the leaves of the trees had unfurled, Jamison and I drove to the small town of Mount Vernon twenty miles north of Iowa City. Our destination was a coffeehouse called Fuel, a standard-bearer among coffeehouses with nooks and comfortable chairs, ample table space, amusing oddments to look at and buy, not to mention great coffee, and cookies baked in small batches all day long. (Jamison works part time in a bakery and has developed, she says, a snobbery about cookies: Fresh from the oven or none at all!). Fuel is one of Jamison’s natural habitats; she reads and writes there for hours at a stretch, so it seemed the ideal spot for a good long chat into the digital recorder. Also, as Jamison herself pointed out, The Gin Closet, which came out in paperback this month, is concerned with three generations of women and Fuel is run by three generations of women. Today, the granddaughter served as barista as the grandmother baked.
Stella, The Gin Closet’s protagonist, joins a long line of literary heroines, very intelligent young women on the cusp of adult lifewho willfully make bad choices (think Emma Woodhouse, Dorothea Brooke, Hester Prynne, Isabel Archer). At loose ends in her mid-twenties, Stella works for a famous, abusive boss and has fallen in love with a married man. In part to console herself, Stella moves in with her grandmother Lucy only to discover that Lucy is dying.
Jamison’s prose is lyrical, with the frank blare of youth:
Every night I said things like: Today my boss and I got drunk at lunch. Today my boss was on Oprah! Today I spent a thousand dollars on gift baskets. Today I used the word “autumnal” twice, and both times I was speaking to tulip salesmen…I compressed my days neatly into appetizer courses. I worked as a personal assistant for a woman with a reputation for treating people like shit, and she treated me like shit. I couldn’t spin witty versions of the rest. In the darkness I began caring for my collapsing grandmother. She wasn’t being inspirational or having sex or treating anyone like shit. She was just getting old.
As Lucy dies, a secret emerges: Stella has an aunt, Matilda, who was cast out of the family before Stella was born. After the funeral, Stella sets out to find this Aunt Tilly, ostensibly to deliver a letter but really to set things right. Tilly is found in a trailer in the Nevada desert.
The novel alternates between Stella’s first person and her aunt Tilly’s limited third person narrations. Tilly is a late-stage alcoholic and ex-prostitute whose difficult past Jamison renders fearlessly. Tilly’s one son Abe, a banker, has been sending her enough money so she can quit turning tricks; he wants her to live with him in San Francisco, but only if she’ll stop drinking. Stella convinces Tilly to take up this longstanding offer and the three of them—Stella, Tilly and Abe—set up housekeeping together in the city.
The center, if there ever was one, doesn’t hold.
As I suspected, Jamison is whip smart, articulate and intense—a terrific conversationalist.
Michelle Huneven: What got you started on this book—what was the germ, the seed?
Leslie Jamison: The short answer is my family I was working on a different novel and was stuck--I didn’t understand how stuck. I moved into a family home with my grandmother who was very sick. My life was taken over by her declining health. Trying to take care of her was completely beyond what I understood how to do. I realized when I woke up in the morning that there was no way I could work on this other novel, it had no claim on my heart or thoughts, so I just started writing with no particular plan about what was happening with my grandmother and how it was bringing up a lot of feelings about our family, a lot of old wounds that hadn’t been repaired. I had a fantasy that they could all be repaired before she died. It didn’t happen that way. But I was left with these pages about how I wish things had been different in our family, in particular with an aunt who had been estranged for a long time. I started to write a novel that explored bluntly what if-- what if my aunt came back into the conversation of my family. That scenario had a lot of emotional weight with me and really drove the first draft of the novel. It took many more drafts to get further in--and further away from my family.
MH: I particularly liked Stella’s mix of naieve hopefulness and her blind confidence that she could repair the familial breach and somehow accomplish what her mother and grandmother hadn’t managed to do.
LJ: Yes, Stella has a dual feeling of guilt and superiority. I shared some version of that, myself. You feel responsible for what your family has done, even if you weren’t alive for it, but you also feel like, I’m better than that, I would never do that to somebody, and what’s more, I can go fix it. Stella thinks "I can do what my mother wasn’t capable of doing, which was to love the damage in another person."
MH: In a way, Stella’s a classic young heroine. She’s smart and deep, but she’s not yet fully-formed, which makes her ripe for demons—in the beginning of the book, she has a terrible boss, she’s deep in it with a married man, then she’s in over her head with her sick grandmother. A flick on the back of the head is all that’s needed to send her down some misbegotten path—like saving her aunt.
LJ: Which lets you in on the dirty secret of what altruism really is, which is saying I don’t know how to deal with my own stuff so I’ll immerse myself in somebody else’s stuff, so I can feel like a hero in their life.
MH: Yes, but there are times when nothing can touch your low self esteem except getting out of yourself and being of service to another person.
LJ: We can do good things out of flawed motives--which doesn’t make them less good. But you can also show up for a certain situation only to discover that the situation is bigger than you are--you’re really signing up to lose control.
MH: One scene really haunts me. Stella goes to her aunt’s trailer in Nevada and sees the gin closet, her aunt’s drinking room. It’s a terrible womb-tomb place, bottles, flies, a turkey carcass of all things, a stool in the corner—truly the nightmare version of a tuffet. Appalling! But the next thing you know, Stella and Tilly are drinking together. Reading along, I was thinking: No! Don’t do it, Stella--you’re giving too much ground! I knew she wanted to help her aunt and bring her back into the family. While I never thought she had a chance of succeeding, I really didn’t want her to sink to her aunt’s level.
LJ: I wanted to destabilize Stella’s hero complex from the start to show it as confused. She wanted to connect with her aunt and build a sense of trust and to not be just another voice saying, “you’re a fuck up and we want your problems far away from us.” The short cut to that was to get low with her, get shamed with her.
That’s as opposed to saying I’m here, in a better spot, and I want you to come here too, which imposes a boundary and a separateness that requires a lot of moral fortitude and a kind of caring that’s willing to be patient.
MH: And drinking with her aunt is like taking food in the dark realm, like Persephone eating the pomegranate seeds—it compromises the mission, prefigures its doom.
The novel also plays with a universal orphan fantasy: you’re a little girl and you’re mad at your parents and then you think, Hey! what if I had another, secret family which was my real, true family. Even the happiest child imagines at some point that she actually belongs with the fairies.
LJ: (Laughs) Yeah! Drunken fairies! Absolutely. Stella replaces her mother with a woman she can be a mother to. She has trouble recognizing all the ways that her mother has been a mother for her, and wants to instead focus on what she resents her for and to replace her with a relationship that can make her feel good about herself, where she can occupy this nurturing role. What Stella’s mother has given her is complicated, but there’s a lot of good in it. And that, I think is ultimately the reckoning in the orphan family fantasy--where you have to come back and say, maybe I didn’t want the fairies after all.
MH: It’s Coraline—suddenly your busy, hardworking mother seems infinitely better than the one who wants to replace your eyes with buttons.
LJ: Or Where the Wild Things Are. Suddenly, your cold porridge in your room doesn’t look so bad after where you’ve been…
MH: I was interested, too, in how, when the new family forms, when they move into Abe’s apartment, closeness doesn’t follow. The two educated young people don’t really know how to find common ground with Tilly, who is white-knuckling it through her days working at a new job that’s essentially busywork, and trying to put her stamp on the loft by decorating it with cheap little trinkets she finds on her wanderings. The three don’t even enjoy a honeymoon period together.
LJ: Yes. It’s strange to suddenly be family with someone with whom you don’t have that whole backlog of quiet awkward shared family experience. Tilly and Stella are family but there’s no territory that they share beyond a feeling that it’s wrong that they hadn’t been family so far. So there’s kind of a rabid good intention coming up against, well, what it looks like day to day.
MH: Here’s a question all the bookclubs will ask you: How did you write so convincingly about prostitution?
LJ: I did what every self-respecting PhD student does...which is to say, I went to the library. I checked out 20 books from the Yale system and spent a month doing little but reading them. The main thing I remember feeling from all these womens' stories was that, yes, many of them were stories of incredible hardship, but they weren't about soul-erasure or the effacement of dignity--they weren't black and white Before and After stories. There was a tremendous amount of dailiness; not quite so much melodrama as I'd imagined. I remember thinking, I'm not qualified to imagine my way into this. And then thinking, I'm just going to have to get over that.MH: What writing, what literary models conditioned you for writing The Gin Closet?
LJ: I distinctly remember reading--over the course of two long, lonely, completely engrossed days--the entirety of Yates'Revolutionary Road. I'd reached one of those points where I'd forgotten what the point of a novel was--why the world was better-off for having it, I guess--and why I was writing my own; and I read Yates and felt such deep humanity and honesty and richness in his world, and felt myself so changed--I thought, if I can do this for anyone, the book will be worth it. The deep geneology of my conditioning had been going on for a long time before the draft, as is true for all writers: Faulkner and Woolf are my twin gods; Plath has always been important to me, Anne Carson, the many beautiful and talented writers I'm lucky to call friends.
MH: What’s the next book? How is it different or the same from The Gin Closet?
LJ: I am working on the second draft of a novel about the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaraugua.
I feel like The Gin Closet was a gush of consciousness. I wrote it from pure feeling. I followed it intuitively. I’m not sure if any of my other books are going to be like that. The process of writing since then has been much more deliberate-- not that my heart isn’t involved. But I’ve been extending out of myself much more, whereas with the first one, I was dredging stuff out from inside myself. That’s not to say it’s totally autobiographical.
MH: Who are you looking to now, for the new book? What writers do you reach for to “prime the pump” so to speak—to make you want to write?
LJ: There are some writers who make me want to write, and other writers who make me feel as if I can write--as if I have it in me--and these circles aren't entirely overlapping. Shirley Hazzard makes me want to write--in fact, she makes me want to write exactly like she writes--but this is usually bad, because I end up writing second-tier Hazzard instead of any-tier Jamison. I usually read poetry when I'm trying to write--it makes me swollen with beauty and possibility, with honesty, but it doesn't call up the urge to imitate. Lately I've been reading Carson's Nox, and Berryman'sDream Songs. The new book is about history, which gives me a rich well of reading that isn't fiction. I've been reading a lot of Sandinista memoirs--they are just so fucking interesting; full of the physical world and translated curse-words and a surprising (maybe not so surprising) amount of sex and humor.
MH: You seem to have a penchant for poets…how has living with/among poets affected your writing and your attitudes toward fiction and poetry?
LJ: I've always thought "A penchant for poets" might be a good title for my memoir, if I ever publish one. I've dated a few of them, and--as you point out—I have been living with one for several years, in a house so laden with books in multiple genres it's creaking at the seams. As I've mentioned, poetry gets me inspired to write--I love getting close to the minds that make it. I love having conversations over scrambled eggs about line breaks and refrains, because I get to think about making without thinking about my own making. Sometimes it's hard because I feel like Practical Peggy juxtaposed against the infinite and infinitely disorganized energy of a poet--short attention span, fickle production, wild strokes of genius.
MH: So which side are you going to root for this year at the Writers Workshop softball game?
LJ: I'm going to have to root for fiction. Genre before love. Plus, my boyfriend loves to argue, so I think this will suit him just fine.
MH: How has it been being back in Iowa City for two years, when you’re not at the workshop?
LJ: Yeah! (Laughs and squints at the iphone on the table between us) How much time do you have left on your little recorder there?

Kirk, I wouldn’t say “symbolism over substance” is exclusively a liberal deficit, though it’s very prominent in liberal/left politics. (And I say that as a person on the liberal/left end of the spectrum.)

Occupy was an outpouring of frustration from people who were hurting, frustration that was unaccompanied by any real goal or any strategy for realizing a goal. Which is what you’d expect from a country whose population had subscribed to end-of-history narratives, whose systems its public believed would persist whether or not laypeople engaged in politics. So the deregulated corporate sphere could do its work while we were busy fighting the culture wars, or figuring out our stances on signature issues like abortion or immigration or the “war on terror,” or just living our own lives. And by the time we realized were were being robbed—“we” being people on all sides, left, right, whoever—we had no idea how to go about challenging the 1% who robbed us.

I think “OWS crystallized, framed, and popularized an analysis of class inequality that is still resonating today” is giving OWS too much credit. But OWS is for many instrumental to the understanding of class inequality we’re beginning to build after Trump’s election. It’s also essential to understanding why liberal/left agendas so often fail: because they’re not *agendas* at all. If you can take your anger and translate it to a concrete set of changes you want made—in the housing market, in the regulation of the corporate sphere, in the enforcement of antitrust law, in wages, in campaign finance, whatever—and from there figure out the smaller actions that will allow you to *realize* those changes you’ve hammered out, *then* you will have something. It’s hard, awakening from the torpor of the 80s and 90s, during which we were led to believe the systems that grant us all some measure of material security, comfort, and leisure didn’t need us to maintain them. But if there’s one thing that Occupy’s rise and collapse (among many other events in the 2010s) crystallized, it’s that we absolutely must wake up from that torpor, and think and act in genuinely political ways.

OWS made no difference except to provide evidence that simply complaining about things without providing a concrete alternative is not enough – which of course the Democratic Party ignored, fatally, in 2016.

Kirk, you’re ability to whittle down complicated societal and political issues into pithy “libtard” digs never fails to amaze me. For this rebuttal I’ll simply say the GOP is in full control of our government and has managed to accomplish very little. What’s the GOP’s “substance” on health care? Or was Obamacare a “symbol” they capitalized on (very, very successfully)?

BOTH parties have failed the 99% (ok so maybe OWS has left an imprint) for the last 30-40 years now. Until we realize that and abandon the petty partisan pissing matches, America will continue its reversion toward Gilded Age plutocracy.

Nam Le is the author of the debut short story collection, The Boat, which Junot Diaz calls, "an extraordinary performance." Michiko Kakutani of the New York Timeswrote that Le's "sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power." I agree. I went to graduate school with Nam, and in our first week, he called to me from across the bar: "I read your story... you animal!" It felt like a real creative writing buddy moment. It's been great fun seeing him gain all of this much-deserved acclaim.The Millions: Although you capture a wide range of voices and locales in these stories, the prose in this collection feels distinctly yours, from the well-placed sentence fragment to the descriptions of light. Can you talk a little bit about how you craft sentences, and how language creates the worlds you're exploring?Nam Le: There are so many ways to think and talk about this (you're basically asking for my ars poetica!) Here's how I've been thinking about it of late: every sentence carries within it a certain set of charges, vibrations, shapes - and what I try to do is chase down a state that's maximally charged, or shapely. Sometimes that state is more visually concerned - how a word looks - fits - into a sentence, and sometimes more aural; sometimes it treats more with images, other times abstractions. This is what I mean by a text's organic imperatives: these "states" can't be pinned down on a pulled-back level; they're not conformable, in isolation, to describable tendencies (long or short, cerebral or sensory, complex or simple). They have to be dealt with on their own terms, within their own contexts. Of course the effect this has on a technical level is pretty disheartening: it suggests that every sentence that is, on first go, serviceable, efficient - even competent - can almost always be improved, can be brought to a fuller communicability.TM: How long did you work on the stories in this collection, and what was the revision process like, especially once you conceived of these stories as a book?NL: I worked on this book about four years all up. It's tough to divvy up the time because the whole process can be so lurching and spasmodic: basically the first versions of these stories were written over two years, then they were rewritten and revised pretty intensely for the next year (those that got placed in magazines in collaboration with the respective editors), then again, for another year - at times from the ground up - with my U.S. editor at Knopf, Robin Desser, and, to a lesser extent, my Australian editor at Penguin, Meredith Rose - both tough, sensitive and superb editors. As tough as they were, though, inevitably I was my own toughest critic. I wanted to discharge what I knew to be the insane privilege of getting published with the personal undertaking to myself that every word, every choice, would be weighed, tested, spoken for. I wanted to be able to stand behind each story (even if only, at the end, to boot them out of the room).Revision's hard, of course. There's none of the typical pay-off of plowing new turf, it's a constant challenge to fence with different sensibilities as well as to gauge the slippery sensibility of that hypothetical reader, and maybe worst of all, the whole thing's potentially endless. Time and time again you have to convince yourself you're completely done with something - then time shows you again and again you're not. A case in point: "Halflead Bay" arose out of the germ of another story, "The Keeper," the former clocking in at about 20,000 words, the latter 16,000. Not a single sentence made it from "The Keeper" into "Halflead Bay" - that despite the fact that I was at one time convinced (at the end of many drafts) that "The Keeper" was absolutely done. This sort of anticipatory second-guessing can make it hard to knock off a story, let alone a collection of stories (where by the time you're done with one story, you've got all the others to re-contend with as well).TM: In "Meeting Elise", the narrator receives a painful colon exam. Have you ever received this kind of treatment, and if not, how did you go about writing about such a subject? How far will you go in the name of research?NL: I know your game, Edan - you want me to deny this so that later, when I refuse to deny something else, you can infer it's true! Did I undergo a painful colon exam? I'm certainly not going to answer this kind of question and the answer is certainly no.That said, I'm not averse to going as deep as possible in the name of research. In this case, for example, I consulted doctor buddies, looked up medical sites and blogs and checked out photos and videos (which in themselves were plenty painful for me). Generally speaking, nothing's off-limits when it comes to research - it's just a case of from how far into the rough you like to putt.TM: I know that you repeatedly watched the pilot to the television show "Friday Night Lights", at one point charting the various plot points introduced. Why - was it more than mere curiosity? Do you look to other forms of storytelling (television being one example) to help you with your own work?NL: Wow, it's like we're friends or something - like you actually know me! (Either that or you have a hidden recorder on my TV set, which is something I'd rather not think about...) Look, if there's one thing we literateurs like to lament even more than the inferiority of TV to books, it's the implied inferiority - aesthetic, intellectual - hell, political and cultural too - of TV-watchers vis-a-vis book-readers. There's overlap between the groups, obviously, but it's not exactly subversive to suggest that TV, more than literature, caters to society's lowest common denominator. I don't disagree with this, but I do think this lowest common denominator might be higher than we give it credit for. For me, TV (and yes, other forms of storytelling too) can provide instruction in a lot of particulars, but perhaps, especially, in the art of narrative manipulation. Watching the pilot of "Friday Night Lights" - a network, not cable, show, mind you - makes me newly sick with envy of the brutal economy of film. (If a picture is worth a thousand words, how to calculate the worth of a thousand pictures, stitched together to convey continuous real-time motion, and then underlaid with sound?) When it's well done (and in "Friday Night Lights" I think it is) TV serves to remind us how sophisticated even the "commonest" audience is - how many narratives it's capable of holding at any given time, how deftly it can unpack story and character ramifications based on the scantest of cues, how easily it can calibrate plots and sub-plots working at parallel- and cross-purposes. Of course there's massive shorthand at work, and the recognitions evoked are typically shallower, more familiar, less textured, than arise out of literature - but in truth I find the narrative structures of "cheap" TV shows more adventurous and formally emboldened than those of "literary" fiction. Plus TV's often more fun - and I'm sure a large chunk of my own fiction could probably use a primer there too.TM: You were a fellow at Provincetown - a place that would certainly terrify me in the winter, especially if all I had to do was write. What did you do with your time there? Does your writing process change with any of these moves in locale?NL: Provincetown during the winter is a magical place. The most beautiful thing about it is how it coheres with the mood of your work; that feeling you usually have to spend time and energy and luck chasing down before being granted access, that feeling that, in the real world, is constantly short-circuited - by the real world. In P-town, it's as though your creative sensibility is never shut down, is left on permanent standby, and you're always writing, even when you're walking, or watching TV, or cooking, or clamming, or playing ping-pong. On top of that, P-town brings together three elements which make me feel more fully alive - the beach, big weather, and a community of artists not limited to just writers. There was only one downside. I lived in the A-framed top floor of a barn and the toilet was tucked into one of the vertices; I half-sprained my back every time I took a piss.TM: What's your impression of the American literary scene, now that you've had a book published and been on book tour?NL: So far as I can tell: in terms of clout, cash, influence, reach, interconnectedness, and, to my mind, aesthetic ambition and distinction (in all senses of the word), it's still the biggest game in town. I don't mean that as provocative statement (I'm writing this from Australia) but as a surmise based on my limited personal observation. Big is both good and bad. Looked at from a mainstream vantage, the American literary scene can seem oligarchic, self-sustaining, incestuous - the same conglomerations publish the prohibitive majority of books sold and given serious attention - and, too, soulless and numbers-driven. Yes, it's a machine. But now I've been chewed up and spat out by it, I can report that it's a machine with many moving parts, many points of input, potential jams, and built-in redundancies. It's a machine still largely fueled by aesthetic passion and enormously dependent on voodoo, timing, and serendipity. It's a machine still tended by human beings working in something close to a state of faith (or, in another way of thinking, professional negative capability) - because, amazingly, no-one yet knows how exactly the machine works - or how exactly to work it.From a more inside-baseball perspective, the literary scene can actually seem quite decentralised and diverse. This is particularly true on the emerging end, where MFAs teem and thrive alongside literary presses, magazines, journals, zines, blogs, etc, as well as - all the way up the spectrum - festivals, readings and reading series, book clubs and groups, independent stores, and various reviewing and lit crit forums. There's a lot of news about literary culture currently being under siege - and a lot of truth to that - but having felt the community and energy out there I can't help but wonder whether this might be, in fact, the ideal condition for literature.TM: What was the last great book you read?NL:Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road.